16 year old me would be mortified to learn 42 year old me gets together with a group of adults and their children to play music and sing songs. all jokes about me singing “if i only had a brain” will be sent to /dev/null.

we’ve been doing it for years. turns out it’s good, clean fun. the kids enjoy it and it’s a great excuse for me to challenge my inner hermit.

odin picked the cello for his school music program. With solid foundation in sight reading and music theory from ongoing piano lessons I’m sure he’ll pick it up quick! i can’t wait to hear the sound of the strings through the house. right now they’re practicing picking out notes. bow work starts soon.

kris and i couldn’t get out the fair until the evening and arrived just in time to catch cultivate, a band of current and former employees, who played at our 25th anniversary party at a trade show. they sounded great and really got the crowd going!

while i’m certainly familiar with the band and have some of their cds and enjoy their recorded material, i was completely unprepared to be totally blown away by their live show. it was really and truly and incredible show. almost beyond words. the videos don’t do any justice to seeing them live. if you get the chance to see them live, do it!

some of the band members create paintings while performing.

after the music, a local troupe of fire performers put on an excellent show to close out the night. if only i had my camera ready to catch the “grand finale”!

we’ve been going to the kickapoo country fair for the past 7 years and this was definitely the best ever. big kudos to everyone who helped pull it off even with the fire and big thanks to everyone who came out to enjoy the fair!

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conflux - a curated confluence of curiousness

“There is no doubt that retail is making a big bet on health care. If it succeeds, the payoff will be enormous. But just as Uber is at war with the taxi industry, retailers will soon be at war with the large, publicly-traded health care chains.”venture beat

wow.“Beginning with this weekend’s NHL All-Star Skills Competition and All-Star Game, the NHL will use GoPro cameras to deliver viewers never-before-seen perspectives of the game.” odin and i would watch this all. day. long. A++

“Our current cultural obsession with food is undeniable. But, while the advent of the foodie may be a 21st century phenomenon, from an evolutionary standpoint, flavor has long helped define who we are as a species, a new book argues.”npr

“Here’s the thing: in order for fees to work, there needs be something worth paying to avoid. That necessitates, at some level, a strategy that can be described as “calculated misery.” Basic service, without fees, must be sufficiently degraded in order to make people want to pay to escape it. And that’s where the suffering begins.”the new yorker

“The problem, then, is less how much time people have than how they see it. Ever since a clock was first used to synchronise labour in the 18th century, time has been understood in relation to money. Once hours are financially quantified, people worry more about wasting, saving or using them profitably. When economies grow and incomes rise, everyone’s time becomes more valuable. And the more valuable something becomes, the scarcer it seems.”the economist

oooooh, sick burn. i haven’t listened to a single episode and it has been fascinating to read back and forth on merits. “And you gotta ignore a lot of things to think anything Serial showed us was new. Unless, of course, you get most of your news from public radio, which mostly ignores local murders, making you that person who has no idea about the local string of smash-and-grabs at the 7-Eleven, but knows all about the government in the Balkans. Great: That person learned something.”the concourse

“But when I started to dig into it, I discovered that the chicken has actually played more roles across human history, in more societies, than any other animal, and I include the dog and the cat and cows and pigs. The chicken is a kind of a zelig of human history, which pops up in all kinds of different societies.”national geographic

“When faced with a set of complex information, you tend to turn the volume down on the things that are difficult to quantify and evaluate and instead focus on the few things (sometimes the one thing) that is most tangible and concrete. You then use the way you feel about what is more-salient to determine how you feel about the things that are less-salient, even if the other traits are unrelated.”boingboing

“Cue Thomas Edison, whose invention of the light bulb revolutionized and regularized sleeping schedules, eliminating segmented sleeping: The longer a house had lighting, the later a household would go to bed. Electricity had elbowed out night-waking, along with its valuable qualities. “By turning night into day,” wrote Ekirch, “modern technology has obstructed our oldest avenue to the human psyche, making us, to invoke the words of the 17th-century English playwright Thomas Middleton, ‘disannulled of our first sleep, and cheated of our dreams and fantasies.’” Wehr agreed, suggesting that current routines have not only changed our sleeping patterns, but also “might provide a physiological explanation for the observation that modern humans seem to have lost touch with the wellspring of myths and fantasies.”utne reader

the nyc mta is exhibiting exhibiting subway color photos from 1966 that have never been shown in public. i agree with, they feel remarkably contemporary, except for the complete absence of smart phones and earbuds. [ via ]

“We were trying to see if very young children could figure out cause and effect,”…“What we discovered, to our surprise, was not only were 4-year-olds amazingly good at doing this, but they were actually better at it than grown-ups were,” Gopnik says…Exploratory learning comes naturally to young children, says Gopnik. Adults, on the other hand, jump on the first, most obvious solution and doggedly stick to it, even if it’s not working.”Mind/Shift

“A former intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many intelligence failures that “she should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done.”the new yorkerupdate: the intercept identifies the cia official, alfreda frances bikowsky.